“Consult not your fears, but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.”

Pope John XXIII

Tom Stoppard could be forgiven for the Daily Telegraph Features headline on Friday ‘I have LOST my optimism’. Horrendous violence in Ukraine, global warming, an international pandemic, widespread poverty and looming recession — it all speaks the language of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who were no doubt exercising the mind of Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey in his recent remarks on inflation.

And yet, if we are to take seriously the words of Pope John XXIII in the quotation above, there is much merit to be found in looking forwards.

So please read on, as this week we look for the silver lining and find real reason for hope.

First, the war in Ukraine. President Zelensky has expressed the view that the conflict can only be fully resolved through diplomacy, while also reflecting on the immense damage that Ukraine has inflicted on the Russian army. Indeed, a retired Russian Colonel Mikhail Khodarenok, invited as a studio guest on Russian state TV, acknowledged that the situation for Russia ‘will clearly get worse … we’re in total geopolitical isolation … the situation is not normal’.

It is, of course, an open question as to whether Putin will be able to remain in power, but it can only be a matter of time before this catastrophe is brought to an end. When it is, there will be reasons to be genuinely hopeful as the world recoils from autocratic tyranny — as Professor Tim Evans points out in The Bigger Picture.

But it's not only democracy and free world resilience that had been boosted by this war — it's also bringing down the closing curtain for the era of fossil fuels. The combination of trade strangleholds and soaring prices has given a huge boost to alternative energy, and made its production much more profitable. On 25 April we drew attention to the XLinks project, just one of the massive projects which will come into production within this decade.

So it's not surprising that Stuart Kirk, the Global Head of Responsible Investing at HSBC, got a rap on the knuckles from his boss when he made disparaging remarks about the dangers of sea level rise over the next one hundred years. He was no doubt trying to encourage a focus on investing in adaptation measures, but his rather defeatist tone towards the longer term is seriously out of place.

There is, of course, a need to look carefully at mitigating against the damage that climate change is bringing about — indeed we wrote about protecting sea levels in the Mediterranean by creating a barrage across the Straits of Gibraltar on 5 August 2019. But it must go hand in hand with a resolve to achieve zero carbon economies.

Meanwhile economic challenges can also be resolved if we adopt a more egalitarian form of capitalism. There are real challenges to be solved, but the impact can be significantly reduced by taking a more innovative approach to economics. For example, recession is defined by successive quarterly reductions in GDP: but, as we have pointed out (20 April 2020), GDP fails to recognise the huge steps forward as a result of technology. What we need to do is to find ways to channel that wealth creation for the benefit of everyone, as put forward in our ‘Stock for Data’ proposals (21 February 2022).

It's also necessary to introduce inter-generational rebalancing, in order to provide opportunities for young people from disadvantage backgrounds. Levelling up is best done by individual empowerment, particularly when cost of living increases bear down so hard on those with the least resources (7 February 2022).

Quite a few of our programmes this week look at the psychological challenges of money: Motley Fool picks up themes from Gandhi and Dante, and The Hypnotist proposes a balanced approach in its episode The Peach Tree. Meanwhile Deepak Chopra, whose quotation we used on 15 November 2021 for this commentary, suggests the following values as the basis for getting more out of life:

You aim to be happy and fulfilled

You are self-reliant

You give of yourself to others

You listen and learn

You make other people’s success as important as your own

You expand your options

You act out of love

You take responsibility

You have ideals and live by them

You are curious about new experiences

You are peaceful

You are open-minded

You inspire yourself and the people around you

You have self-acceptance and know your worth

These are all invitations to a better way of living, looking forwards. They pay little heed to the errors of the past — looking backwards so often gives rise to pessimism.

The old saying ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ (George Santayana) has its place, but only to the extent that it helps us to move to a better future. It is a feature of our material existence that time marches forward at a constant pace — we cannot revisit the past, for better or for worse: so why dwell in it?

At a time when there is a perfect storm of convergent problems, it's worth looking beyond our present experiences and seeing how we can make the world a better place.  

Gavin Oldham OBE

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